JUSTIN PUTNEY OF AJAR Productions has written several extensions for Flash, geared towards the designer and animator. Justin is passionate about writing extensions, which is clearly evident in this quote from his website: “I am officially addicted to making Flash extensions. It seems to tickle some very nerdy part of my brain.” I highly recommend visiting and bookmarking his website: http://ajarproductions.com/blog http://ajarproductions.com/blog/ flash-extensions http://www.ajarproductions.com
By the time you read this, I am sure he’ll have several more extensions available as he seems to post new ones almost daily. Thanks Justin!
FrameSync
This is a handy-dandy animation plug-in similar to Animonger’s AnimSlider (previous example), except that it uses frame labels and requires no other setup. Create a new layer in your Graphic symbol containing your mouth shapes and add descriptive Frame Labels for each frame. Select the instance of the mouth symbol and click the “refresh panel” button (or check the “auto refresh” feature) in the FrameSync panel. Create a keyframe and then simply click the desired frame inside the FrameSync panel window to set your mouth shape.
Roughen Edges
Flash is known for its smooth vector looking graphics. This extension adds a command that will remove that typical Flash vector look by roughening the edges of lines, fills, and drawing objects. It can also be re-applied for more dramatic effects. It’s an imperfect implementation, so make sure you keep an eye on what you’re doing. There can be some unexpected results, especially when applying it to one element repeatedly.
This extension creates Classic tweens, applies strong easing (both in & out), automatically adds keyframes, duplicates layers, swaps symbols from the Library, turns on bitmap smoothing, aligns objects, and applies tinting to white and alpha to 50% or 0%, scaling, arranging flipping, and more! It’s like an info-mercial where they keep throwing in extra features!
Guide Maker
This is a very smart extension that provides a simple and clean way to create guides. You can specify guides based on a percentage of the stage or type in an exact numerical value that represents the number of pixels in between each guide. The integrated color picker is for customizing the color of the guide. Guides can even be saved and reused!
Select Frame Range
Enter a starting frame and an end frame, click “OK” and this clever extension will select all the frames in between.
Motion Preset Preview
Once you’ve created a custom motion preset, you can use this command to immediately create a live preview from your current document.
Convert Timeline to Symbol
This extension has been a long time coming. If you’ve ever needed to copy and paste long complicated animations into a symbol then this is for you. Just run this extension from the Commands menu, provide a name for the symbol and click “OK”.
